


Fade

by melizajoyt



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Loneliness, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Rey wants what she wants, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Fix-It, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Spoilers, and she goes and gets it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-09
Updated: 2020-01-09
Packaged: 2021-02-27 08:15:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22183927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melizajoyt/pseuds/melizajoyt
Summary: What’s a kiss between fated enemies on the brink of death?Nothing, obviously. The answer is nothing.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 7
Kudos: 35





	Fade

**Author's Note:**

> I loved The Rise of Skywalker overall, but that ending...
> 
> anyway, I couldn't let that lie so I wrote this little thing.
> 
> Title inspired by the song Fade by Lewis Capaldi which on top of just being a beautiful song, seemed especially relevant to Reylo

She doesn’t think about him for a few days. A handful of blissful days, peaceful and weightless and her friends are _finally_ happy without the heaviness of war hanging over their heads and following them to bed each night. For a brief period, the Resistance fills every empty space inside her with light. Or at least the reflection of light. It’s almost bright enough to feel.

Then, the dust settles.

And so does the emptiness.

It sinks into the chipped pieces of her and grows heavier until waking is a struggle and fighting seems like a distant concept that she’s simply weary of. It’s a pit, this void inside her. It takes a week for it to speak to her and when it does she cries in the face of its truth. The loneliness is all-consuming, more than it’s ever been before.

Her world fractured when he faded, but she’s stubborn and burying things is kind of an expertise of hers so that’s what she does. She buries the feelings even though she knows it’s a wasted effort. She buries the sabers because those crystals aren’t hers or anyone else’s anymore and it truly feels like a death. She rebrands herself, but that feels like its own burial. She’s not on a junkyard planet anymore, but she’s just as alone as she ever was.

Leave it to the universe to pick her from the haystack, show her the galaxy and the Force, hand her a half of herself that she always felt was missing and then rip all of it away.

It takes an embarrassingly long time to come out of her own head. If the war taught her anything, it’s that there’s always a path and with that realization she finds new purpose.

Snoke might have been the one to bridge them together, but she knows he didn’t manipulate how they reacted to it. In the end, it doesn’t matter how it happened. What matters is how _right_ it had felt. True balance. His darkness to equal her light and his light to weigh against her dark. Because neither of them were clean. They were just two sides of a war, spinning around and around and hurting and healing each other. She doesn’t need him anymore, she can recognize that. He was always the key to ending the war and now that it’s over she could do anything. He’s not _necessary_.

Except.

She wants.

She doesn’t need, but she wants. She wants him. She wants to know him beyond sacrifice and broken families. She wants time. She wants to not be alone again. She wants to be selfish for once. Not a face of hope for a battle bigger than her.

So, in the night, when the swirling vacuum opens inside her, she doesn’t shy away and she doesn’t crumple into a crying mess either. She steps toward it and gets swallowed by the depth of it. It’s like tumbling through empty space. For an eternity all she does is float. Then, everything goes still in a familiar way that makes her heart race. It’s a door opening in her mind and he steps through.

He looks different. He’s still scarred, but his clothes are dark and soft. There’s no war where he is, she realizes with a start. He’s rested, clearly and it suits him.

“What are you doing?” he asks, tilting his head.

Hearing him almost makes her lose her grasp on this tenuous link between them which feels overstretched, but firm for the moment.

“Getting you back.”

Ben frowns and stuffs his fists in his pockets. “I can’t come back, Rey.”

He’s just so distracting. She longs for this, but the real version where he’s in front of her and she could reach out and grab him if she wanted. When they were both on the same plane they managed to touch even across a galaxy, but she knows that whatever distance she’s crossing now to speak to him won’t permit anything like that.

“I will get you back.” Her voice is steel.

He looks at her, then. Really looks his fill, focusing mostly on her face. The determination he finds there is not a new expression for her.

“What if I don’t want to come back?”

Rey lifts her chin and glares.

He tries again. “They all hate me.”

“They don’t know you,” she argues.

“They know Kylo Ren.”

“Good news for them, Kylo Ren died two weeks ago,” she says and shrugs. “I’m here for Ben Solo.”

He shakes his head, but is abnormally quiet. She’s so accustomed to his energy and she can’t feel him here. He used to fill the air between them to bursting with his emotions. A volatile, explosive thing. She misses that, weirdly.

“Him and I are the same, you know,” he continues. “Don’t fool yourself.”

She’s already irritated by him and it should make it easier to let all of this go, but she clings harder. Her teeth grind together.

“Kylo or Ben, whatever you want to go by, you’re not the same anymore. There’s no erasing the past, yes, but we both know you have no intention of repeating that past. All I know is that Kylo Ren needed to die so that Ben Solo could finally live, but he never got to that part. Kylo took them both when he left and I-” she has to catch her breath from the onslaught of emotions rocking through her. “I want him back. I want _you_ back.” Her voice cracks and she swallows down the next noise.

He’s staring again and her skin prickles with the ghost of a touch. A memory or maybe just fantasy.

“Give this up, you silly girl. Forget me.” He turns on his heel and she cries out against the sharp tug in her mind. She fights it, but their connection has always been a two-way street and without him she can’t hold it open. She surfaces from the void, shaking and drenched in sweat. She heaves and retches over the edge of her cot.

It takes her three days to recover.

Old habits die hard, she thinks bitterly as she flips another page in the tattered book. Typically, she would fill such dull hours with trinkets and broken pieces to busy her hands, but whatever connection she still has to Ben requires a high price and the most she’s been able to manage is reading. It’s not her favorite pastime.

She will have to build up strength if she’s going to talk to him again. It’s probably for the best that she redirect her feeble energies to reading, she could use any answers available. Her tentative plan at the moment involves a lot of tug-a-war between herself, Ben, and whatever lies beyond the door he stepped through.

She knows. She’s working on it.

She turns another page and sighs.

It’s for the best that she decided to go her own way after the war, but she does miss her friends. She has a lot of time with just her thoughts and more often than not she runs herself in ragged circles looking for answers, but the idea of sharing her plan makes her palms sweat and heart skip. They’d never let her.

So, the distance is important to maintain. She does her best to call regularly instead and she gets better at lying. That dark emptiness whispers that to get him back will require a heavy fee and she wonders just how far she’s willing to go for what she wants.

When she doubts herself, she recalls Ben’s smile and his kiss. It’s hardly the most impactful thing about him when you compare it to his sacrifice, but it is the most visceral reminder she has. It’s a concrete memory to fall back on when she seeks resolve. Reminding herself of the life she’d felt with him in her arms and in the curve of his lips is enough to put it all in perspective. If a memory as brief as that could bring her so much peace and resolution, then having him for more than a minute would ignite her. It would bring about another shift in her tiny slice of universe.

It takes more time than she’d like, but she gets back to training the second bedrest isn’t a necessity. She sleeps a lot more and her dreams are filled with him; with the life she wants him to be able to live. For all the years she spent on Jakku patiently waiting and hoping for a family that was never coming back, she can’t bring herself to dig into that well of tolerance now. She’s done waiting for life to come to her. The war taught her the virtue of her own agency. Now, even when she feels like she can’t get up, she does.

Days pass.

He’s not surprised to see her again, but he does seem annoyed.

Good. She can work with annoyance. They push each other like that.

“I told yo—”

She rolls her eyes, “obviously, I didn’t listen.”

He’s dressed in a black sweater and dark blue pants and it’s the most casual she’s ever seen him. It’s weird, but only in its foreignness. She realizes that she likes it in the same moment that she realizes how much she’s staring.

It’s not easier to be in this place the second time around. The effort she’s exerting is significant and even in this strange floating emptiness, she quakes with it. If she looks closely, her own skin vibrates, nearly turned blurry from the speed. It’s too much to ask that he not notice.

“How much time has passed since you brought us here last?” he asks, the suspicion easily identified in his tone.

To fight him on this would be a waste of time. “Eight days.”

It’s weird to not know if he’s angry. He was always quick with his rage, easy to boil over given the chance. Now, his face is blank and his hands are tucked in his pants again, out of sight.

“You’re making a mistake.”

“You know what this is costing me, don’t you?” she throws back, eyes narrowing.

“I do and I’m telling you, you’re making a mistake,” he hisses and it’s a relief to see him so riled up again.

She uses that small reminder of what she wants to push herself further, reaching outwards with her mind. A bead of sweat rolls down her temple and she doesn’t have enough in her to be subtle. When she reaches for Ben in her head it feels like she’s stretching a projection of herself, thrusting it away and even then it’s not enough. She huffs and tries to find leverage in a place that doesn’t know the concept of solid ground. It’s slow and grueling work, but she gains inch after slow inch. The first goal is to reach him.

“Rey,” he says urgently, “ _stop_.”

In spite of her current focus she can’t help but bark out a sharp laugh. He can’t honestly believe something like that would work on her.

He growls and the tangle of sounds might be a string of swears, but she can’t focus on him enough to tell. She shoves against the heaviness that slows her progress and grunts in satisfaction when it gives enough for her to wrap part of her mind around Ben. Just one loop around him won’t be enough so she digs into herself and exhales out of her nose because her jaw is too tense to open.

She’s yanked suddenly and that same ripping feeling from the last time Ben left is back. She has enough of a grip to keep him there, but only just. He yells that she’s going to kill herself and she screams from the pain, but doesn’t let him go. Everything around him seems to shimmer for a moment before it collapses and for a split second she can feel their connection burning through them, more vibrant than ever before.

Her concentration breaks and he slams the door on her again and something vital splinters inside her.

Her small ship is blurry when she opens her eyes and it’s a long time before she can lift even a finger. The last time Ben broke away it had been horrible and painful, but this time around it almost kills her.

It takes twenty-two days before she’s ready to try again and she knows she won’t get another chance.

In the days leading up to it she meditates a lot. She slips in and out of sleep so often that her dreams mix with her days until they’re almost impossible to tell apart. She feels small and naïve among planets and stars that dwarf her existence, but she is resolved and stubbornness sings through her.

The next time she looks across at him they are both different.

He looks haggard, but resigned. He glares at her.

Rey, by contrast, is serene and composed. She feels like she knows what lies beyond that door for Ben and she sees two paths before her, split, but reconnecting at the same place. Either she pulls Ben from this place or she follows him through the door.

He sounds truly baffled when he says, “why are you doing this?”

“You felt the same thing I do. You know why I’m here,” she replies patiently. “We’re not meant to be split. I don’t think I’d even be able to get here if that wasn’t true.”

“I’m not worth it.” It’s a last ditch effort, she can tell, but it’s honest and she knows to tread carefully.

“What about me? Am I worth it?” she asks, staring him down. “You don’t have to do this for yourself yet, but will you do it for me? Will you give me this?”

“I’m not in the habit of giving you things you want,” he snaps, but just as quickly sighs.

Rey smiles then and feels the victory just as vividly as any triumph on the frontline. “No, but you are in the habit of keeping me from dying. I was actually counting on that.”

His tone is even when he says, “I hate you,” and she can’t wait a second longer to actually _feel_ him again now that he’s all but agreed.

There’s no pain when she reaches for him this third and final time because he doesn’t cling to this strange, in-between place. It’s still an effort, but one that they tackle together and really, it’s just another battlefield only this time they’re fighting for each other, not for anyone else.


End file.
